You never forget your first
music love — or your first concert. For me, they were both Miss Diana Ross . I will never forget mini me waiting with my dad where she was expected to make her grand entrance through the audience and to the rotating stage at Valley Forge Music Fair in the Philadelphia suburbs. Seeing the Supreme One come out in a flurry of feathers and sequins to “I’m Coming Out” — the 1980 Chic-produced classic and enduring LGBTQ anthem that she recorded without realizing that “coming out” was a declaration of queer liberation — it was like witnessing a real-life goddess on earth. Right there in Devon,
Pennsylvania. For me, the love for the artist, the legend born Diane Ross 80 years ago on March 26, 1944 — her birth certificate was mistakenly filled out with the name Diana — has been an endless one. She had me from the moment I got my little hands on my dad’s 8-track tape of her eponymous 1976 album, as her meticulously beat face stared out at me before enchanting me with her No. 1 hits “ Theme from Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)” and “Love Hangover” — plus all those deep cuts the real fans know. And while I have had other diva love affairs over the years — from Janet Jackson to
Beyoncé — she’s the O.G. I’ll never get over. My earliest memories of Miss Ross — as, rumor has it, she famously liked (or demanded) to be called — included her movies as much as her music. Although it would be years before I could watch the full, unedited version of her film debut as a drug-addicted Billie Holiday in 1972’s “Lady Sings the Blues” — for which she and the great Cicely Tyson (“Sounder”) became only the second and third African-American
Women to ever be nominated for a Best
Actress Oscar — it has always been a symbol of black excellence. And so were 1975’s cult classic “Mahogany” — which would once again pair Ross up with Billy Dee Williams — and 1978’s “The Wiz.” I can remember going to the movies to see the big-screen adaptation of that Tony-winning musical with my family when I was a little kid, feeling like we were going to a
Hollywood premiere. But even before I was born, Ross — repping her native Detroit as Motown’s leading lady — had already had a Rock & Roll Hall of Fame career as the supreme Supreme, notching 12 No. 1 singles with the greatest girl group of all time. Ross — just as much as Marvin Gaye, just as much as Stevie Wonder — turned Berry Gordy’s ’60s vision of Hitsville upside down when she became a solo superstar in the ’70s. Indeed, she was — she is — the blueprint for the modern-day pop diva, from
Madonna and Janet to Beyoncé and
Rihanna . When I interviewed Nile Rodgers four years ago to celebrate the 40th anniversary of 1980s’s “Diana” — Ross’ best and best-selling album that he co-produced with his Chic cohort Bernard Edwards — he summed up what the silkiest of singers meant not only to the pop kingdom but, perhaps more importantly, black America. In fact, “I’m Coming Out” was meant to be the perfect concert opener with which Ross could make a regal entrance as black royalty for the rest of her life. “I said, ‘Diana, this is gonna be your coming-out song. We think of you as our black
Queen,’ ” he told me . “And I even wrote a [horn] fanfare. I explained to her that it’s just like when the president comes out and they play ‘Hail to the Chief.’ ” And as Ross — ever the epitome of beauty, style and grace — has been the fierce face of Saint Laurent’s Spring 2024 campaign, she shows no signs of slowing down from touring at 80. Mind you, this is 60 years after the Supremes made their debut on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” performing “Come See About Me.” “I had never seen black women on television, or anywhere for that matter, who conveyed such glamour and such grace,” said no less than
Oprah Winfrey in 1993. Same, Oprah. Same.